Professor Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard at the Department of Physics and Astronomy talks on Danmarks Radio's "Viden Om" programme about NASA's Kepler mission. The Kepler Mission is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone. The continuous monitoring of thousands of stars to a very high degree of precision brings about scientific possibilities apart from planet-finding. One of these is the study of stellar oscillations. This branch of science is called asteroseismology. With asteroseismology stellar masses and radii can be determined to a much higher precision than with any other method. Asteroseismology will be used for characterizing the brighter host stars of the planets discovered with Kepler.

Link to broadcast (in Danish) dr.dk from 19 January 2010.

Image credits: NASA. The image shows a small portion of Kepler's full field of view.